One of the biggest problems confronting the aerospace industry is achieving efficient communications among disparate information technology architectures. Aerospace companies with legacy equipment that is decades old must communicate with the most modem innovations. In addition, these dissimilar technologies must all adhere to common messaging standards.
For instance, some aerospace mission-critical messages may require a specific format, i.e., all capital letters. Or messages may need to be transformed from the industry's legacy TypeB format to XML for emailing or SMS. As no software application can be developed for all possible needs, companies often find themselves constricted when needing data manipulation functions beyond the application's basic purpose.
One solution has been for each company to write new software or adapt existing software, usually by modifying and extending the functionality of an existing application or .dll file. The company may outsource the modification to a third party or to the developing software company to customize the application specifically for its unique needs. Either approach takes a large IT staff experienced in multiple programming languages, takes long periods of time to succeed and takes considerable financial investment. Modification, compilation, installation and testing of existing source is extremely time consuming.
However, a simpler, less costly, and less time consuming method of transforming protocols is often required. For example, U.S. application Ser. No. 11/740,795, having common inventor Stephen D. Perkins of the present disclosure, entitled METHOD, SYSTEM, APPARATUS, AND PROGRAM TO FACILITATE COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN SYSTEMS” (hereinafter “Application '795”) eases communication between a plurality of communications devices having a plurality of communications protocols. One step in the process of Application '795 requires transforming incoming information, which is in the protocol of the sending device, to the outgoing protocol required by the receiving device. Methods of the prior art require complex protocol manipulations, costly software development projects, and wasted time for developers to learn proprietary or in-house protocols to develop such transformation programs. A simple, scalable program which allows one with ordinary skill in the art to develop transformation scripts is desirable. This would allow a simple, cost-effective, time-manageable solution for transforming between protocols. It should be noted that such a method may have many applications which will be apparent to one with ordinary skilled in the art.